Leadership

Becoming an Extraordinary Leader Overview

This course will provide you with practical ideas about how you can enhance your own leadership capacity – in fact, how can you become an extraordinary leader.  We base the leadership portion of this course on a leadership model comprised of five components:  Leading Self, Providing a Strategic Focus, Leading Others, Managing Others, and Connecting with Others.

Extraordinary leaders know how to elicit feedback from others and engage in structured reflection so they can identify and consolidate the lessons of their experience.  Feedback enhances the power of leader development because assessment processes, whether formal or informal, help people fully understand their situation and become motivated to capitalize on the learning opportunities available.  Throughout your EMBA program, you have been learning to lead by learning more about yourself.  You have completed a number of assessments including the Work Preference Indicator that have provided you with insights into your personality, leadership style, and work preferences.   As you come to the end of your EMBA program, this course will provide you with a final opportunity to assess your strengths and to reflect on how to leverage your strengths in order to add value within and beyond your work organizations. 

We will discuss the concepts of authentic leadership and we will look at a number of leaders “in action” to gain insight into how authentic leadership principles contribute to the effectiveness of leaders.  We will also explore and critique the approach of one leader for developing a vision for the future for the organization; aligning the organization behind that vision; and motivating people to achieve the vision. We will also look at how a leader uses power and influence to create results.  And finally, we will examine how a leader can develop an effective decision making process within his or her organization.  Lectures and case discussions will be supplemented with experiential exercises that provide yet another opportunity for assessment and reflection of your leadership capabilities.